2020 by Robert Onopa

his weight.
    His heart went out to the people who needed a place to live, but what else could he do? When the big winter storms came slamming in from the Pacific, as they would in a month, the great breakwater itself a mile out wouldn’t hold back the rising seas. Even in good weather the utility hookups were rats’ nests and sewage fouled the waters for a click out. When the storms came, the collisions, capsizings, swampings—sheer overcrowding in the harbors killed thousands every year on this part of the California coast alone.
    Voorst sighed, looked around to take his bearings. He’d covered all of the northern quarter of the harbor except for a crumbling pier near shore. He told himself that’s where he’d quit for the night.
    He walked over. He started writing off a string of listing hundred-foot hulks, sheet metal and wallboard shacks on scow hulls, when he realized that one rusty hull, partly sunk, was blocking a dozen small boats moored to a pontoon dock along a hidden channel.
    That’s where he found the Swan .
    * * *
    She was an antique sailboat, a racing sloop from the 20th Century, Scandinavian-built, about forty feet on the waterline. He’d seen a boat like her in the museum in San Francisco once: a glass hull with fine, fast lines, a flush teak deck for quick sail changes, a tall mast with a narrow crosstree. Her gull-winged cockpit set her apart from other old racing boats and gave her away even from beneath a thick layer of grime. He’d never forgotten the words etched on the steel plaque in San Francisco: Nautor Swan .
    This boat’s reg numbers didn’t show up on his readout. She certainly was run-down: filthy, her decks gouged, her brightwork the washed-out color of driftwood. Her winches were crusted over and her rigging hung from the mast like an old spider’s web. But there was no disguising the heartbreaking sleekness of her design.
    “Hello!” Voorst called out from dockside, banging on the hull, hearing the fatigue in his voice. “Ahoy the Swan .”
    The boat had lost its rudder, seemed a bit low in the water. Still, he couldn’t just have her sunk. He calculated his alternatives and started writing out a warning notice to post on the hull when he heard the companionway hatch scrape open on its tracks. The hair rose on the back of his neck—in the red glow from a secondary fire, the harbor had turned weirdly quiet; he hadn’t met anyone for an hour.
    And now a girl emerged from the low cabin. She was wearing a T-shirt of a provocative blue beneath a khaki windbreaker. She was slim-hipped, high-cheeked, and pretty, but certainly just a girl. He guessed from the look on her face that she would have disappeared had she anywhere to go.
    “Are you Army?” she said. Her skin was smooth as a mannequin’s. Her hair was honey-colored despite the Oriental fold in her eyes and the flatness of her nose—someone’s exotic, beautiful daughter.
    “SoCal Harbors Office. Where’s your family?”
    “I’m older than I look,” she told him, lips tight. “Try twenty-two. Are you going to squander all the boats in the harbor? The way you did up in Seattle?”
    He grunted. “Who told you that?”
    “Everyone knows about it. There’s a pinch, the boats get condemned. The next thing you see, they’re sunk at anchor. Then the bay gets filled in by some developer and apartment blocks go up.”
    The story bothered him too. The trouble in Seattle, as he recalled, had been a petrochemical slick that had unfortunately ignited at the turning of the tide. “We’re not sinking anybody at anchor,” he told her. “You’re mistaking me for the FedHarbors people. But for your own safety . . .”
    His pager squawked and he stopped, took a message from ComNet: FEMA had scheduled a briefing at the fire’s source on Dock G North at 0600.
    He’d had to look down to read the message display and to shut his pager off. When he looked back up, the girl was gone.
    * * *
    At the morning